Try using Slashdot (or most other sites) all day in an airport or at a cafe with your laptop, then see how long it takes for someone to start F-ing around with the Javascript that your browser is receiving in the clear. And then there are those lovely residential ISPs that screw with your web pages for not very different reasons.
The EFF wants to see the web prepared for an assault that looks likely to intensify.
There's is no "drugs are harmless routine" coming from me, that's for sure.
YOU are the moron if you cannot distinguish between a society that copes with illegal substances as a matter of routine police work, and one that increasingly imposes martial-law style tactics on its own population (you know, the WAR in the "War On Drugs").
What ACTA represents is a possible "War On Piracy" which could reinforce police state patterns in this and many other countries. That's a road we should just not go down.
You could make the same 'unenforceable' case about drugs (they can be grown or synthesized easily at home using todays technology), but the reality is that the War On Drugs was a pretext for putting inner cities under a sort of martial law. The result is that in the USA the police have been militarized and the prison system has grown to proportions that are unprecedented in human history.
So I suggest a more preventative approach to the problem.
I agree with your first paragraph about resistance.
But extra resistance for an unnecessary conflict is where I draw the line. Once the govt does start sinking billions into the new policies, there will be an investment in them that makes them entrenched. What's more, the govt isn't some distant enemy... they are right here using OUR resources for this shit.
So the attitude of "who cares what they do, we'll eventually win" I do not agree with. Its encouraging the waste of money, resources, trust and civility.
The best course is to prevent something like ACTA from being adopted in the first place.
If Stallman were a cynic, he wouldn't have believed that people might follow his alternatives. He would have dismissed everyone as greedy bastards and not even tried.
Stallman is used to people making money off of his stuff, and even encouraged it.
Why are they anti-web. This advert story is about ads in their native app platform.
Because they are moving the online advertising into their proprietary OS so it will be unblockable, while at the same time putting ad blockers into the Safari web browser.
If you want your ads to reach iPhone and iPad users, you will have to pay Apple or one of their iAd partners to get yours ads into the operating system's ad channel; Your web-based ads will mostly be invisible to these users.
Combined with Apple's HTML5 demo site that shut out non-Safari web browsers, it starting to look like Apple is becoming a very anti-Web company... even more so than Microsoft.
I've been a Mac fan since 2004, but Apple has gone too far: They want to see then end of the Web and the personal computer now. They can go to hell.
Under Leopard FF always degraded a lot under intensive use of Flash video. It was as if creating and closing dozens of Flash video objects kept leaving something behind that the browser couldn't quite get rid of. Over a period of a couple days intensive use, simple actions like tab creation and menu display (and everything else) would become CPU intensive and very slow. Restarting the browser would become necessary.
Maybe this is why Mozilla switched to handling Flash objects in a separate process.
Since the upgrade to 3.6.4 this 'buildup' problem doesn't seem to be occurring at all: FF is staying zippy. I am very pleased!
What is this about improving the ability to bring new Linux-based devices to market? There are scads of them already, and that's part of the problem.
The fragmentation these devices represent mainly occurs above and below the kernel level: Above in the sense that the libraries and UI kits that are included change greatly not only between devices, but also between iterations of a single product; Below in that there is no (realistically desirable) minimum hardware spec for a Linux-based device in any given class like smart phones.
So this Linaro effort doesn't seem to help out where help is most needed IMO: Enabling creative types who work above the hardware level to identify and easily make use of a robust and attractive platform... something to confidently write apps on. As with the PC revolution, again its the apps that will win user interest.
Linaro maybe more of an attempt to get the likes of Google to heel with its forking of the Linux kernel for use in Android. But I would say that Android itself is the better focus for a standardization effort: it is full-featured so the roles that any particular components will be expected to satisfy can be looked at much more holistically when features are being written or debugged. And without that holistic view -- like what happened to Desktop Linux as a vague concept -- components that are written or standardized outside of a specific user-targeted platform (like Android, or iPhone for that matter) are unlikely to give rise to a coherent and satisfying user experience.
IOW, design affects all layers simultaneously and what works for people administering servers does not work when people expect to create/sell/share software applications on a user-oriented platform.
I like what the brits have tone with the BBC. I could get behind that kind of government support. I don't want to see Ruport Murdoch sucking at the public teat while putting out his bullshit.
I agree with that general sentiment. The license fee has worked very well to create a news bureau with a high degree of impartiality and that has a different set of priorities than the commercial media. But if it were up to the latter, there would be nothing but commercial media in the UK or anywhere else in the world-- no one with a different structure or set of priorities to compete with, no way to threaten the rest of society with the possibility of a great monopolist merger on the horizon.
Murdoch et al prefer the situation in the USA, with a public broadcaster that is little more than a fig leaf... and is captive to a legislated budget and the political environment generated by a growing number of regional media monopolies. The actual news programs on PBS and NPR don't even DO investigative journalism unless you count FRONTLINE which is not news since it is usually 6-24 months after the fact. These two networks do not break new stories, they let the commercial networks do it for them although we are supposed to give them credit for removing the most obvious of the lying and hyperbole before repeating the material. This system of sponsorship from corporations, well-heeled donors and the political process is incapable of working for the public interest (not that anyone else is being held to that standard these days).
As to the question of government creating a fund for news media, I say that the current political climate operates too much on rank dishonesty and power-mad corporatism to even want Congress to go near the issue.
Part of the problem is that the secure/insecure distinction has an explanation that is buried somewhere in a faq on the website. It would be better if people were given a browser with Tor that in one unified visual element allow people to tell immediately what the anonymity and security levels are at the moment.
Almost anyone could get into that game, at least in a small way with one or more Tor exit nodes.
That's the problem with using something that bridges back to the normal Internet: Security can be quite low without painstaking preparation. I2P at least will not pose such a risk because your destinations are all inside the darknet, and even https is discouraged because the connections are considered secure as well as anonymous (your base64 address acts as the public key that pairs with your local identity which is secret).
The problem is, according to Special Relativity, massless particles move at the speed of light, and time does not advance for them.
But can't photons be generated and absorbed? Wouldn't that be a change in state over time? How about Doppler shifting.. doesn't that indicate the frequency and energy level of a photon can change over time?
Maybe massless particles can change over time if they are being changed by some (unknown) property of spacetime.
It is the Windows market that has the very fast upgrade cycles built into it; Mac users are known to take considerably longer to upgrade.
And your remark about malware is a common fallacy among PC dittoheads: Before OS X, Mac OS had quite a problem with viruses and other malware. The difference between then and now is not market share, its the Unix architecture. But I can understand how architecture determining a system's level of security would be lost on a PC dittohead.
As for mobiles, you also need to realize they're not only becoming more important but that Unix-like platforms are dominating that market now that RIM is moving to QNX. Microsoft is getting left in the dust.
Wanna see an Apple user's head explode? Ask them if their device supports IPv6, and watch them strain to answer without giving away that they dont know what the fuck you are talking about.
This is the stupidest thing I've read on/. in a while. You must seem like quite the conversationalist at barbecues and birthday parties (assuming these aren't the lemming-like activities you are referring to): "My GOD man! Haven't you prepared for the IPv4 apocalypse yet?!!" Other guy: "I don't work in IT, remember? If you'll excuse me, I just remembered I have to talk to that person waaay over there..."
...or Unix-like: RIM now uses QNX, Apple uses an OS X core, Android uses Linux. These put together outnumber Microsoft's mobile platform by a large margin.
All MS makes money from today is Office and Windows, and their Office market share is being slowly eaten away. They are hugely rich, but in a hugely precarious position as well. And they're freaking out over the fact that throwing money at new markets isn't working out for them; They just fired a large swath of management.
As far as their sources of profit go, MS is still existing in dinosaur PC land. And the current crop of young adults HATE! PCs because they're unruly and malware-infested (IOW they're "just gross!"). Its clear by now that MS is going to take down the whole PC paradigm with it.
...on their policy by running to the MPAA or the government (both of which have megatons more money to throw around than VPN subscribers, money that's welcome in any country I might add). And if the authorities decide to play whack-a-mole with uncooperative VPN services surely more will pop up -- but then subscribers have to keep paying for new subscriptions to new providers and these providers will be less and less established. The game will keep getting more costly and less certain/trustworthy to the consumer.
The proper way to proxy in a draconian environment is to use a network based on FOSS anonymizing software like Tor or I2P that does onion routing. The latter is made to handle P2P traffic and even has a built-in bittorrent client, whereas Tor prohibits P2P data transfer.
You need to link up to an anonymizing network with some kind of routing (like onion routing) that creates a level of anonymity... see the link in my sig for a good example of such a network.
The reason encryption alone doesn't work (turning encryption on as a connection requirement in a torrent client) is that anyone from the ISP to the police to the MPAA can simply join the swarms the same way you do. From the standpoint of large corporations, that requires very little effort and may even be less complex than setting up special packet-inspecting equipment to scan unencrypted traffic.
Adding simple encryption only makes it hard for an ISP to throttle or attempt disconnection on P2P traffic. It doesn't prevent anyone from easily discovering that you're uploading.
Slashdot Mirror
O RLY?
Try using Slashdot (or most other sites) all day in an airport or at a cafe with your laptop, then see how long it takes for someone to start F-ing around with the Javascript that your browser is receiving in the clear. And then there are those lovely residential ISPs that screw with your web pages for not very different reasons.
The EFF wants to see the web prepared for an assault that looks likely to intensify.
BTW, there is such a thing as being too cheap.
...and I use NoScript regularly :)
Still, for those of us who setup systems and browser for other people, a simpler extension like HTTPS Everywhere will help immensely.
...in smartphones and hand held devices in general.
iPhone -- iOS Unix
Android -- Linux
Palm -- Linux
RIM -- Moving to QNX
That leaves Symbian and Windows Mobile as the two non-'nix holdouts.
There's is no "drugs are harmless routine" coming from me, that's for sure.
YOU are the moron if you cannot distinguish between a society that copes with illegal substances as a matter of routine police work, and one that increasingly imposes martial-law style tactics on its own population (you know, the WAR in the "War On Drugs").
What ACTA represents is a possible "War On Piracy" which could reinforce police state patterns in this and many other countries. That's a road we should just not go down.
Please see my response to girlintraining here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1689618&cid=32608916
You could make the same 'unenforceable' case about drugs (they can be grown or synthesized easily at home using todays technology), but the reality is that the War On Drugs was a pretext for putting inner cities under a sort of martial law. The result is that in the USA the police have been militarized and the prison system has grown to proportions that are unprecedented in human history.
So I suggest a more preventative approach to the problem.
I agree with your first paragraph about resistance.
But extra resistance for an unnecessary conflict is where I draw the line. Once the govt does start sinking billions into the new policies, there will be an investment in them that makes them entrenched. What's more, the govt isn't some distant enemy... they are right here using OUR resources for this shit.
So the attitude of "who cares what they do, we'll eventually win" I do not agree with. Its encouraging the waste of money, resources, trust and civility.
The best course is to prevent something like ACTA from being adopted in the first place.
If Stallman were a cynic, he wouldn't have believed that people might follow his alternatives. He would have dismissed everyone as greedy bastards and not even tried.
Stallman is used to people making money off of his stuff, and even encouraged it.
I thought it was pretty funny too. But it's not ironic or hypocritical... they're recognizing how their site can sometimes have a negative influence.
http://www.webmd.com/balance/features/internet-makes-hypochondria-worse
Would the smartphone version be any better?
Why are they anti-web. This advert story is about ads in their native app platform.
Because they are moving the online advertising into their proprietary OS so it will be unblockable, while at the same time putting ad blockers into the Safari web browser.
If you want your ads to reach iPhone and iPad users, you will have to pay Apple or one of their iAd partners to get yours ads into the operating system's ad channel; Your web-based ads will mostly be invisible to these users.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/2329/saturday-night-live-canis
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/06/apples-evil-genius-plan-to-punk-the-web-and-gild-the-ipad.ars
Combined with Apple's HTML5 demo site that shut out non-Safari web browsers, it starting to look like Apple is becoming a very anti-Web company... even more so than Microsoft.
I've been a Mac fan since 2004, but Apple has gone too far: They want to see then end of the Web and the personal computer now. They can go to hell.
Some people say this but I don't see what the problem is with recent Firefox versions on OS X.
Under Leopard FF always degraded a lot under intensive use of Flash video. It was as if creating and closing dozens of Flash video objects kept leaving something behind that the browser couldn't quite get rid of. Over a period of a couple days intensive use, simple actions like tab creation and menu display (and everything else) would become CPU intensive and very slow. Restarting the browser would become necessary.
Maybe this is why Mozilla switched to handling Flash objects in a separate process.
Since the upgrade to 3.6.4 this 'buildup' problem doesn't seem to be occurring at all: FF is staying zippy. I am very pleased!
What is this about improving the ability to bring new Linux-based devices to market? There are scads of them already, and that's part of the problem.
The fragmentation these devices represent mainly occurs above and below the kernel level: Above in the sense that the libraries and UI kits that are included change greatly not only between devices, but also between iterations of a single product; Below in that there is no (realistically desirable) minimum hardware spec for a Linux-based device in any given class like smart phones.
So this Linaro effort doesn't seem to help out where help is most needed IMO: Enabling creative types who work above the hardware level to identify and easily make use of a robust and attractive platform... something to confidently write apps on. As with the PC revolution, again its the apps that will win user interest.
Linaro maybe more of an attempt to get the likes of Google to heel with its forking of the Linux kernel for use in Android. But I would say that Android itself is the better focus for a standardization effort: it is full-featured so the roles that any particular components will be expected to satisfy can be looked at much more holistically when features are being written or debugged. And without that holistic view -- like what happened to Desktop Linux as a vague concept -- components that are written or standardized outside of a specific user-targeted platform (like Android, or iPhone for that matter) are unlikely to give rise to a coherent and satisfying user experience.
IOW, design affects all layers simultaneously and what works for people administering servers does not work when people expect to create/sell/share software applications on a user-oriented platform.
I like what the brits have tone with the BBC. I could get behind that kind of government support. I don't want to see Ruport Murdoch sucking at the public teat while putting out his bullshit.
I agree with that general sentiment. The license fee has worked very well to create a news bureau with a high degree of impartiality and that has a different set of priorities than the commercial media. But if it were up to the latter, there would be nothing but commercial media in the UK or anywhere else in the world-- no one with a different structure or set of priorities to compete with, no way to threaten the rest of society with the possibility of a great monopolist merger on the horizon.
Murdoch et al prefer the situation in the USA, with a public broadcaster that is little more than a fig leaf... and is captive to a legislated budget and the political environment generated by a growing number of regional media monopolies. The actual news programs on PBS and NPR don't even DO investigative journalism unless you count FRONTLINE which is not news since it is usually 6-24 months after the fact. These two networks do not break new stories, they let the commercial networks do it for them although we are supposed to give them credit for removing the most obvious of the lying and hyperbole before repeating the material. This system of sponsorship from corporations, well-heeled donors and the political process is incapable of working for the public interest (not that anyone else is being held to that standard these days).
As to the question of government creating a fund for news media, I say that the current political climate operates too much on rank dishonesty and power-mad corporatism to even want Congress to go near the issue.
I thought that the DNA of two (or more) different species had to be mixed into a single organism to be considered a hybrid in this context.
The ear-on-a-mouse looks like an example of a temporary graft.
Part of the problem is that the secure/insecure distinction has an explanation that is buried somewhere in a faq on the website. It would be better if people were given a browser with Tor that in one unified visual element allow people to tell immediately what the anonymity and security levels are at the moment.
Almost anyone could get into that game, at least in a small way with one or more Tor exit nodes.
That's the problem with using something that bridges back to the normal Internet: Security can be quite low without painstaking preparation. I2P at least will not pose such a risk because your destinations are all inside the darknet, and even https is discouraged because the connections are considered secure as well as anonymous (your base64 address acts as the public key that pairs with your local identity which is secret).
The problem is, according to Special Relativity, massless particles move at the speed of light, and time does not advance for them.
But can't photons be generated and absorbed? Wouldn't that be a change in state over time? How about Doppler shifting.. doesn't that indicate the frequency and energy level of a photon can change over time?
Maybe massless particles can change over time if they are being changed by some (unknown) property of spacetime.
It is the Windows market that has the very fast upgrade cycles built into it; Mac users are known to take considerably longer to upgrade.
And your remark about malware is a common fallacy among PC dittoheads: Before OS X, Mac OS had quite a problem with viruses and other malware. The difference between then and now is not market share, its the Unix architecture. But I can understand how architecture determining a system's level of security would be lost on a PC dittohead.
As for mobiles, you also need to realize they're not only becoming more important but that Unix-like platforms are dominating that market now that RIM is moving to QNX. Microsoft is getting left in the dust.
Wanna see an Apple user's head explode? Ask them if their device supports IPv6, and watch them strain to answer without giving away that they dont know what the fuck you are talking about.
This is the stupidest thing I've read on /. in a while. You must seem like quite the conversationalist at barbecues and birthday parties (assuming these aren't the lemming-like activities you are referring to): "My GOD man! Haven't you prepared for the IPv4 apocalypse yet?!!" Other guy: "I don't work in IT, remember? If you'll excuse me, I just remembered I have to talk to that person waaay over there..."
...or Unix-like: RIM now uses QNX, Apple uses an OS X core, Android uses Linux. These put together outnumber Microsoft's mobile platform by a large margin.
All MS makes money from today is Office and Windows, and their Office market share is being slowly eaten away. They are hugely rich, but in a hugely precarious position as well. And they're freaking out over the fact that throwing money at new markets isn't working out for them; They just fired a large swath of management.
As far as their sources of profit go, MS is still existing in dinosaur PC land. And the current crop of young adults HATE! PCs because they're unruly and malware-infested (IOW they're "just gross!"). Its clear by now that MS is going to take down the whole PC paradigm with it.
...on their policy by running to the MPAA or the government (both of which have megatons more money to throw around than VPN subscribers, money that's welcome in any country I might add). And if the authorities decide to play whack-a-mole with uncooperative VPN services surely more will pop up -- but then subscribers have to keep paying for new subscriptions to new providers and these providers will be less and less established. The game will keep getting more costly and less certain/trustworthy to the consumer.
The proper way to proxy in a draconian environment is to use a network based on FOSS anonymizing software like Tor or I2P that does onion routing. The latter is made to handle P2P traffic and even has a built-in bittorrent client, whereas Tor prohibits P2P data transfer.
Because that's only a solution to throttling by the ISP.
See my other post... http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1668842&cid=32389280
You need to link up to an anonymizing network with some kind of routing (like onion routing) that creates a level of anonymity... see the link in my sig for a good example of such a network.
The reason encryption alone doesn't work (turning encryption on as a connection requirement in a torrent client) is that anyone from the ISP to the police to the MPAA can simply join the swarms the same way you do. From the standpoint of large corporations, that requires very little effort and may even be less complex than setting up special packet-inspecting equipment to scan unencrypted traffic.
Adding simple encryption only makes it hard for an ISP to throttle or attempt disconnection on P2P traffic. It doesn't prevent anyone from easily discovering that you're uploading.